This study empirically investigates if competition’s impact on firm performance depends on the ownership structure. Our results show that an increase in import competition has a positive effect on firms with concentrated ownership and a negative effect on firms with dispersed ownership, regardless of the level of domestic competition. Given that the optimal level of ownership concentration with respect to firm productivity is high (low) if tariffs are low (high) in the case when import competition is high these results are consistent with theoretical findings that competition has positive effects in companies that are a priori efficient but not in unproductive firms. If tariffs are high, however, they support inferences based on the x-inefficiency literature. Contrary to what has been suggested by some theoretical results, the riskiness of a firm’s environment does not seem to influence our results.

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The Role of Competition and of the Initial Firm Efficiency. Evidence from the Czech Republic

la Cour, Lisbeth; Ionascu, Delia(København, 2007)

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It has been argued that the effect of competition on a company’s incentive to innovate and to reduce managerial slack depends on the initial level of efficiency. For example, while firms close to the technology frontier invest more in innovation if competition increases, backward firms reduce innovation. On a panel data of Czech companies, for the years 1993-2005, we empirically assess the impact of increased competition on firm productivity and the importance of the initial firm efficiency level. We depart from the empirical literature on emerging markets by taking into account both domestic and foreign competition. In line with the theory, our results show that there is an inverted U-relationship between domestic competition and firm productivity. Our results also confirm that trade liberalization has a positive impact on productivity. However, the effect is less significant if domestic competition is not taken into account. In addition, we find that both domestic and foreign competition have an effect on productivity in companies close to the technology frontier but not in backward companies.

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An explorative study of the contracts of the Tender Electronic Daily (TED)

la Cour, Lisbeth; Milhøj, Anders(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Public procurement is estimated to constitute more than 16% of GDP in the EU, see e.g. Ramsey (2006). This is one of the reasons why a lot of interest has been attached to this topic. Most of the papers in this field have been of a theoretical nature but during the last ten years also a few empirical studies have become available, see e.g. Marion, J. (2007) and Bajari et al (2008). At the EU level liberalizations have been going on since the late 80’ies (see e.g. the EU commission (1985). Here certain regulations imply that public projects of a certain size need to be subject to a public tender. Again according to Ramsey (2006) around 16% of all public procurement in the EU is subject to these rules and regulations and information on the contracts corresponding to these 16% can be found in Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) database. In general, the hypothesis is that public procurement will increase competition and ultimately lead to cheaper contracts for the authorities, see e.g. Cecchini (1988) for the economic arguments. But in practice: do the rules and regulations ensure more competition? Do they lead to more internationalization in the sense that more foreign firms become contract winners? Do the government and municipalities in the EU countries actually gain economically from the procurement? Does the choice of type of procedure matter? A lot of interesting questions immediately pops up and some of them – but only some of them - may be analyzed based on the content of this data base. Still, due to the large coverage and the international nature of the data base we believe that a thoroughly study of the possibilities of TED is of major interest and the present study is just a first step in this direction. One of the students who extracted the TED data has also used them for analysis in his master thesis, see Bundsgaard (2010). He has, however, limited his interest to analyze the choice of procedure: auction vs. negotiation and therefore our study has a broader scope when it comes to available variables. To our knowledge we are the first group of researchers who begins to analyze the content of this database using explorative statistical techniques based on a broad range of variables.

In the following we will analyse the sale of alcohol in Denmark. Various figures related to this question are published by Statistics Denmark at different frequencies. Our main concern will be with quarterly data for the sale of beer, wine and spirits from the period 1990 – 2004. Our two hypotheses are: First we want to convince the reader that the total sale of alcohol in Denmark since 1980 has been fairly stable. By total sale we mean the total sale of 100% alcohol so the three categories – beer, wine and spirits are measured in litres of 100% alcohol equivalents. In order to convince the reader that the total sale of alcohol has been fairly constant we will present graphs and various indicators and tests of the degree of temporal dependence in this series. The overall impression from this analysis is that our first hypothesis seems to be supported – at least not contradicted – by the data. Next, we want to model the sale of beer and wine as shares of the total sale of alcohol. Even though the total sale can be considered fairly stable there have been divergent paths of evolvement for the sub-groups: the sale of beer has decreased over the period and the sale of wine has increased. The sale of spirits has been fairly stable. Modelling the system of the beer-share and the wine-share we want to split the total development into a part that can be ascribed to changes in the relative prices and a part that can be explained by changes in taste and drinking habits specified as a trend. By specifying a system conditionally on the prices of beer, wine and spirits and a trend we manage to estimate price sensitivity and taste sensitivity. A small forecasting exercise shows that the final model is fairly good at predicting changes in the shares due to price changes. Finally, the effects on the market shares of hypothetical changes in the taxation of alcohol are discussed.